News sitemap guidelines

When creating your News Sitemap, please keep in mind the following requirements:

Your News Sitemap should contain only URLs for your articles published in the last two days. You can remove articles older than two days from the News sitemap, but they will remain in the News index for the regular 30 day period.

You're encouraged to update your News Sitemap continually with fresh articles as they're published. Google News crawls News Sitemaps as often as it crawls the rest of your site.

A News Sitemap can contain no more than 1,000 URLs. If you want to include more, you can break these URLs into multiple Sitemaps, and use a Sitemap index file to manage them. Use the XML format provided in the Sitemap protocol. Your Sitemap index file shouldn't list more than 50,000 Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server isn't overloaded by serving large files to Google News.

When you publish new articles, do not create a new News Sitemap each time. Instead, update your current sitemap with your new article URLs.

The Google Sitemap Generator can't be used to create a News Sitemap, as it would include URLs that don't correspond to specific news articles. There are a number of third-party tools that can help you generate a Google News Sitemap.

Example sitemap entry

A Google News Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, with additional News-specific tags as defined below. Here is an example of a News Sitemap entry using News-specific tags:

Submit your sitemap

Once you've created your Sitemap, upload it to the highest-level directory that contains your news articles. Please see this page for further instructions on submitting your Sitemap.

News-specific tag definitions

Tag

Required?

Description

<publication>

Yes

The <publication> tag specifies the publication in which the article appears. It has two required child tags: <name> and <language>. The <name> is the name of the news publication. It must exactly match the name as it appears on your articles in news.google.com, omitting any trailing parentheticals. For example, if the name appears in Google News as "The Example Times (subscription)", you should use the name, "The Example Times". The <language> is the language of your publication. It should be an ISO 639 Language Code (either 2 or 3 letters). Exception: For Chinese, please use zh-cn for Simplified Chinese or zh-tw for Traditional Chinese.

<access>

Yes, if access is not open, else should be omitted

Possible values include "Subscription" or "Registration", describing the accessibility of the article. If the article is accessible to Google News readers without a registration or subscription, this tag should be omitted.

<genres>

Yes, if genres apply, else can be omitted

A comma-separated list of properties characterizing the content of the article, such as "PressRelease" or "UserGenerated." See Google News content properties for a list of possible values. Your content must be labeled accurately, in order to provide a consistent experience for our users.

<publication_date>

Yes

Article publication date in W3C format, using either the "complete date" format (YYYY-MM-DD) or the "complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds" format with time zone designator (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD) format. Please ensure that you give the original date and time at which the article was published on your site; do not give the time at which the article was added to your Sitemap.

Our crawler would accept any of the formats below:Complete date
YYYY-MM-DD (e.g., 1997-07-16)

Complete date plus hours, minutes, seconds and a decimal fraction of a second
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sTZD (e.g., 1997-07-16T19:20:30.45+01:00)

<title>

Yes

The title of the news article. Note: The title may be truncated for space reasons when shown on Google News. Article title tags should only include the title of the article as it appears on your site. Please make sure not to include the author name, the publication name, or publication date as part of the title tag.

<keywords>

No

A comma-separated list of keywords describing the topic of the article. Keywords may be drawn from, but are not limited to, the list of existing Google News keywords.

<stock_tickers>

No

A comma-separated list of up to 5 stock tickers of the companies, mutual funds, or other financial entities that are the main subject of the article. Relevant primarily for business articles. Each ticker must be prefixed by the name of its stock exchange, and must match its entry in Google Finance. For example, "NASDAQ:AMAT" (but not "NASD:AMAT"), or "BOM:500325" (but not "BOM:RIL").

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